What Walt Disney’s Brush With Failure Can Teach Us About Bouncing Back

I’ve been thinking about failure recently.

Why are some people crushed when things don’t go according to plan, while others rebound? And what if the stakes are larger than just your own success? How do leaders stay positive when everything seems to be falling apart?

Story time…

The head of a small movie studio found himself at a crossroads. After early success, everything started to go horribly wrong.

The studio was struggling financially. All but one of his most valuable employees defected to work for a former colleague.

The icing on?the cake? His old colleague left and won the rights to the studio’s most popular asset, an animated character named Oswald The Lucky Rabbit.

Our executive was left with virtually nothing. Can you imagine the emotional weight of that situation? How easy would it be to let anger, sadness, or the desire for revenge overwhelm you?

The executive didn’t stay down in the dumps.

He got to work, and he sketched an idea for a new character, a little rodent he called Mortimer Mouse. He brought Mortimer back to his remaining employees.

They liked Mortimer, but they had some ideas for improvement.?One employee took the rough sketch of a lanky mouse and changed it to one that was rounder and more lovable.

They all chimed in on the name. “Mortimer is a nice name and all,” they said, “but how about something that’s a little more catchy — maybe something like… Mickey?”

The team then decided to make a short movie with this new mouse named Mickey. They wanted to do something really big.

The executive, a young businessman named Walt Disney, suggested adding music to the animated feature. The only problem — no one had ever done that before, and no one knew how to do it.

One of the youngest employees came up to Walt and said he had an idea. What if they matched up film cells to measures of music? It seemed like it might work, so they gave it a try.

And it did work! Together they produced a short film called Steamboat Willie. It launched the career of Mickey Mouse and changed the face of entertainment as we know it.

Walt Disney was a legend and remains a fixture in our lives because he spent a lot of time understanding feelings. Watch any of his animated films to see the power of emotion.

However, in his darkest time Walt was also able to see things from a resilient and strategic point of view.?In short, he was mindful before most of us talked about being mindful.

We can choose how we see events. The apparent crushing failure can be the birth of an even greater idea.

Great leaders hold a positive frame and rally their teams. They ask for their team’s best ideas, then listen. They know that the next Mickey Mouse might be around the corner.

#leadership